PHILIP BUMP: The handling of Hurricane Maria was not an ‘unsung success’

by Philip Bump

Wednesday

Sep 12, 2018 at 2:01 AM

The most recent estimate Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló has offered is 2,975 deaths attributable to the storm.

President Donald Trump invited reporters into the Oval Office on Tuesday to share information about Hurricane Florence, which is spinning toward North Carolina and threatening to unleash widespread destruction upon making landfall. Last year at this time, Trump was enjoying a boost in support after the government’s handling of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. He seemed to be eager to embrace that aspect of his job: manager of disaster recovery efforts.

Hanging over the conversation on Tuesday, though, was Trump’s handling of Hurricane Maria, which laid waste to Puerto Rico shortly after Harvey and Irma struck Texas and Florida last summer. Since Trump’s well-established default position is that what he did was the correct thing to do, he insisted that the government’s efforts in Puerto Rico had worked.

To hear the president tell it, the federal response in Puerto Rico had been an underappreciated success.

Noting that the island had problems with its infrastructure before the storm (and, falsely, that it “had no electricity essentially before the storm”), he praised his administration’s efforts.

“The job that FEMA and law enforcement and everybody did” he said, “in Puerto Rico, I think, was tremendous. I think that Puerto Rico was an incredible unsung success.”

It was not.

The most recent estimate Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló has offered is 2,975 deaths attributable to the storm. That’s more than 1,000 more deaths than were attributed to Katrina..

Earlier this month, the Government Accountability Office released a report. Among the problems identified in the government’s response:

* Problems with debris removal and a shortage of proper equipment for the task;

*Insufficient bilingual employees to communicate with residents and translate documents.

*Not enough generators to meet demand, and not enough recovery material positioned on the island in advance of the storm. The day before Maria made landfall, four generators had been delivered to the island. Thirty-five were delivered to Texas ahead of Harvey. About 1.6 million meals and 700,000 liters of water were delivered and eight shelters opened to hold 306 people. By contrast, before Irma made landfall in Florida, 4.8 million meals and 9.9 million liters of water were delivered and 249 shelters were opened to hold nearly 50,000 people.

*A FEM staff shortage of 37 percent as of Sept. 1, 2017. Of “reservists” called up to aid the recovery efforts in all the disasters, 46 percent of those deployed last year were not rated as “qualified” for their job functions.

*Many reservists on Puerto Rico “were not physically fit to handle conditions on the island,” according to one official, who suggested that “a fitness test should have been required before they were eligible to deploy.”

The GAO report does note, as Trump did, that Puerto Rico had existing problems that exacerbated the difficulties after the storm hit.

“Hurricane Maria devastated the already fragile and outdated infrastructure in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, which complicated response efforts according to the FEMA Administrator and Puerto Rico officials,” the report reads. “Specifically, Hurricane Maria crippled the power grid, communication systems, and transportation infrastructure.”

That recovery effort lagged for months. At one point, the government pulled updates on that restoration progress from FEMA’s website, though the data were restored after a public outcry.

The GAO report is careful to offer a measured assessment of the government’s efforts. But FEMA was “not prepared to respond to an event like that,” the report’s lead author, Chris Currie, told Bloomberg. “They were having a lot of trouble getting people there. And not just people, but qualified people.”

This is the agency’s responsibility. It is the government’s responsibility, a responsibility meant to reduce the number of people who died in the wake of the storm from an inability to access medical services or other causes. In terms of death toll — a measure embraced by Trump himself — the response in Puerto Rico was not an incredible success.

— Bump writes for The Washington Post.

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